Here, we will discuss a few things that you should include in your social media marketing strategy, so that it will work effectively from the first day.

Identifying Goals for Your Business – Make sure that every piece of your social media strategy is working towards the goals that you have. Clearly defined goals are essential to help ensure that you know what you are working towards, and to determine whether you are making progress.Look at your needs and goals, and set out a plan for reaching them.Most companies have similar goals when building brand awareness, cutting costs, and retaining customers are all common. No doubt you will have some clear personal goals as well.Pick two primary goals and another two that will be secondary ones, and focus on those. It is better to have a few clearly defined goals than to have too many and get distracted.

Define your Marketing Objectives – Your goals wont help you if you don’t have some parameters that will help you to tell if you have achieved them. How many new customers do you want? How many new leads would you need to get to consider your marketing campaign a success?Your marketing objectives will help to define how you get from today to your current future goal. They should be SMART -> Specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time bound. Measuring your progress helps to keep you on track.
Take the example of leads and sales. A good objective could be to increase leads by 50%, and to do that you will need to choose which analytics and tracking tools you will use. Your goal should be achievable – it’s highly unlikely that you’ll increase sales by 1,000% – so setting yourself a goal like that will doom you to failure and make it hard to determine what’s wrong with your marketing. You failed because the goal was unrealistic, not because the rest of the strategy was necessarily wrong.Refine your goals over time and consider your objectives as well. Make sure that your leadership are all on board with their respective goals and how they match together.A timeframe is an important part of measuring progress. If you have a long term goal, break it up into smaller milestones. What will you do this week, or this month?A goal of increasing leads by 50 percent ticks the first few boxes, but if you don’t have a timeline for achieving that, it is easy to get distracted with other issues.

Who are Your Ideal Customers?Often, companies that struggle on social media are ones that don’t know who they are trying to reach.Defining buyer personas will help you to reach your ideal customer, with the right message, at the right time.The more you know about your audience – what they like, what they dislike, what they need, and what they like to do – the easier and less expensive it is to reach them via social media.Buyer personas are fictional characters, but they are based on real people. The more specific you can be, the more you’ll get out of each post.

Know Your Competition Paying attention to your competition will help you to see what works, so you can incorporate it into your own efforts. It will also help you to understand what they are doing so that you can better differentiate yourself.Make a list of your competitors, look at how often they post and the tone of their posts. Look at how much engagement they are getting, and how they talk to their fans and their users. What impression are they giving off? How does that compare to what you are trying to achieve with your brand?Engagement is a key metric. Only a page admin can see engagement for specific updates, but you can get an idea as an observer, based on how busy a post is compared to other similar posts and to the page in general.You can divide the number of likes, comments and shares on a post by the total number of fans on a page to get an idea of how popular the page is and how good their engagement is. Do that for at least 20-30 updates to get a true idea of fan activity. If you want to learn more read our social media marketing agency reviewYou can do the same with Twitter posts and with other social media activity, and it will give oyu a strong idea of how the competition is doing so you can see how you stack up.